Contributor: Bob Smithouser

In June of 1989, rocker Don Henley struck a chord with his melancholy musical commentary “The End of the Innocence.” In that song, guileless idealism runs headlong into harsh realities of adult life. Divorce. Deception. Duplicity. But Henley’s Top-10 h …

The year is 1957. As Sputnik parts the October sky over a humble West Virginia coal mining town, one idealistic teen hatches visions of sending his own rockets into space.

Woody Allen plays Z, an animated, neurotic worker ant with an identity crisis.

Want to watch a trailer? They’re all on YouTube. Need to know where you’ve seen that balding character actor before? Cross-reference him on IMDb.com. It’s the rare factoid that’s not available online. Yet even in this age of endless information, gettin …

The production team behind The Prince of Egypt retells the biblical story of Joseph as chronicled in the book of Genesis.

Separated by a freak accident at age 14, twin orphaned brothers John and Jeremiah have grown up radically different.

Every parent of a teenage daughter has, at some point, wrestled with the makeup issue. Should it be allowed? If so, when? What kind? And how much? Contrary to popular belief, World War III will not be waged with nuclear warheads; it’s already being fou …

A 2004 Disney Channel movie called Pixel Perfect involves a tech-savvy teen creating a holographic lead singer for his rock band, the Zettabytes. All goes smoothly until a concert glitch exposes their secret. At first the crowd mutters, “She’s not real …

Comedian-turned-honeybee Jerry Seinfeld knows that the first rule when buzzing around in public is to never speak to humans. Does he keep his mouth shut? Is that a rhetorical question?

After deliberately disobeying his mother, young Hogarth Hughes wanders into the woods in search of aliens, stumbles across the Iron Giant and rescues it from an electrifying fate.

I crouch before her, staring up helplessly at the embedded weapon. There’s no point in comforting words, in telling her she’ll be all right. She’s no fool. Her hand reaches out and I clutch it like a lifeline. As if it’s me who’s dying instead of Rue. …

Class struggles. Young love. The greed and arrogance of the industrial age. These and other themes—plus lots of slam-bang action—energize James Cameron’s Titanic, which was history’s highest-grossing film for more than a decade until the Oscar-winning …

At a sixth-grade Valentine’s dance, a clique of pretty girls makes the mistake of snubbing a nerdy guy. Ten years later, he’s out for blood.

Movies once inspired theme-park rides. Now it’s the other way around. Johnny Depp reinvents pirating in Disney’s swashbuckling high-seas adventure.

It’s tragic when innocent animals die in entertainment. Fictional or not, we still feel their loss. King Kong. Mufasa. Old Yeller. Charlotte. Hooch. Artax. I could go on, but I’m already on my second box of Kleenex. We don’t even have to see their demi …